Wednesday 12 July 2017

I slept for eleven hours last night, and felt a little more cheerful about things today.

The children and I went down the street this morning and bought all the school uniforms. Yikes. It was definitely a lot of money, but school clothes tend to wear well and (except for Soren’s things) everything gets handed down and will do through more than one child. It was a lot of clothes though- two jackets, two jumpers, two ties, six shirts, a skirt, two PE t-shirts, two pairs of PE shorts, two pairs of shoes and two pairs of tights for the high schoolers; and two jumpers and six t-shirts for the primary schoolers. I bought new tracksuit pants for Jericho and Soren from Big W yesterday (they have the plain school colours) which was a good saving, and they could each only get one jumper because that’s all that they had in their sizes, but they’ll call me when the new ones come in. They’ll both have to get a hat too, but that can wait until term 4.

The kids were pretty good when we were shopping, and I think they’re all looking forward to going to their new school even though they’re nervous. Nicholai is very anxious about tying a tie, even though I’ve promised him both Troy and I know how to do it and we’ll help him with it. Jericho is extremely unimpressed that his school uniform is tracksuit pants, since he doesn’t like to wear them. He’s worn the cotton drill pants to school for the past couple of years, and even on the weekends he only ever wears jeans or pants that aren’t tracksuit pants. To be honest I’m not all that impressed with matching green tracksuit pants and green windcheater (Jericho and Soren both the bomber jacket style) either- I always think the kids look like they’re wearing pyjamas when their pants and tops are the same colour! The t-shirts are bright yellow, so overall I’m rating the new primary school uniform as worse than the red and black we had previously.

On the other hand the high school uniform is blue and green and has proper button up shirts and jumpers, which is such a massive improvement over the white (!!!) polo shirts and ugly maroon windcheaters that they used to wear that I love it.

Emma also picked the skirt this time instead of pants- apparently none of the girls here wear pants to school even though there is technically a uniform pants option. I mean, we didn’t see a single girl in pants during the tour and the little girl modelling the uniform to us said that all the girls wear skirts. Even the principal kind of said, “Yes…I think there is a pants option,” sounding pretty uncertain about it, so it’s obviously not really done! Given the weather here I think I would personally wear pants anyway, but I let Emma choose. She’s basically a grown up size now anyway, so she won’t grow out of it in a year, which she would definitely have done if I’d bought her a skirt for year 7. We grabbed a couple of pairs of tights so she’ll have something to start with, but I also went on ebay and ordered her the thickest tights I could find, so hopefully the child won’t freeze.

The dog is getting above herself and has started jumping up on people’s beds to nap. Last night when I went to my room to go to bed she was just curled up next to my pillow, as comfortable as you please, and when I said her name she just opened her eyes in the most hilariously guilty look ever. I have to admit that with Troy gone I was briefly tempted to just let her stay and keep me company, but that is really not something I want to get into so I put her back in her crate. However it hasn’t deterred her, since Soren had to push her off his bed so he could get into it tonight!